Terrain cross section experiment

[Oshyan]

I put together this little scene as part of a support request. Someone wanted to create a "terrain cross section", sort of like this:


http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-118901413/stock-photo--earth-cross-section-with-water-mountains-tree.html


Terragen's basic approach gives you a planet by default and then displaces from that base shape, so at first I wasn't quite sure how to pull this off. But a hint from Matt to start with a cube and it was suddenly obvious.


[attachimg=1]

In the attached TGD I have no external dependencies. I'm using the built-in displaceable cube primitives (new as of Terragen 3.1), one for land and one for water of nearly equal size. I have some basic texturing, using Y for "altitude" distribution. I am also masking the displacement that I am applying for terrain shape so that it does not affect the bottom of the cube. All surface shading nodes for the cubes are in the cube's internal networks. Finally, I added a simple grass population with a bright green color for illustrative purposes. The grass layer shows in particular how to use altitude masks in this setup to limit populations, surface layers, etc. as it's a little different than doing so on the normal planet-based terrain.


Anyway I was pleasantly surprised by the result and it was a novel use of Terragen, so I figured some of you might like to play with it.


Enjoy!

- Oshyan

[russe166]

Thanks! It is great 

[Dune]

Smart. I just did some work for Dorian and ended up with a cube for a cross section as well. Very handy, these displacable objects!

[choronr]

This is neat. If only one external dependency could be used like a DEM, I would like to see the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico; camera very high and viewing down. Would this be possible?

[N810]

Having flashbacks from Terragen 0.9x   

[Oshyan]

Yes, I think you could do that Bob (though I'm not 100% certain what you mean, hehe). You could apply 4 different DEMs to 4 different cubes (I am working on applying a DEM now actually, it must be done with an image map shader of some kind as Hieghtfields do not apply to cubes, I don't think).

- Oshyan

[choronr]

I simply said that a DEM 'Four Corners' area done in this fashion would be good to see.

[Stormlord]

Really interesting, thank you for sharing the file and your explanation.

Stormlord
http://www.dirkkipper.de/Galerie_Terragen/index.php